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Evolutionary Enlightenment 101: Part I
Part I — 51%: The Magic Number
Do you know what the magic number is in spiritual physics?
I’m talking about that all-important equation that makes it possible for us to understand how radical spiritual transformation actually happens. Radical spiritual transformation, in the way that I teach, means significant and demonstrable evolution beyond ego.
Once you see the answer clearly for yourself, it seems obvious. But before you see it for yourself, it remains an ever-impenetrable mystery as to why and how human beings evolve beyond ego. But I figured it out.
To be honest, it took me many years to see this as clearly as I do now. I became a spiritual teacher twenty-three years ago, in 1986. I discovered what I call the Authentic Self about fifteen years later. The Authentic Self is the evolutionary impulse. The Authentic Self is Eros, which we experience at the highest level of our being as the urge to innovate and create that which is new. The Authentic Self is the spiritual impulse, the mysteriously felt urge to evolve at the level of consciousness itself. It’s experienced as a compulsion to become more conscious, more awake — more in touch with life at the deepest level. And it’s the drive toward the new enlightenment — what I call Evolutionary Enlightenment. It’s not the old traditional aspiration towards enlightenment, which was a longing to transcend the life-process, but is, in fact, the very opposite. It’s the drive to become one with the life-process.
In this new enlightenment, the reason we are driven to become one with the life-process is not merely to experience some form of mystical oneness with everything — a nondual integration with the entire display of manifestation. We strive to become one with it for the biggest reason there could be — so we can ultimately take responsibility for where it’s going. And the reason this aspiration is so significant is that, if we succeed, the very process we endeavor to take responsibility for literally begins to awaken to itself through us. What could be more important than that?
But in fact, that’s just the beginning. This potential becomes even more powerful and significant when the profound awakening of and to the evolutionary process happens in and through several people at the very same time. When this occurs, self, culture, and cosmos evolve before our very eyes.
